The delicate beauty in the stories in Dubliners contrasts with the starkness in the lives of the characters

I'd forgotten how incredibly sad James Joyce's "Dubliners" is - or maybe the sadness didn't strike as profoundly when I first (last?) read the collection, when I was very young and all possibilities were open before me - now looking back at Dubliners after such a long time, what I see is the sorrow in people's lives - the sense of how they're trapped by their culture and their circumstances (something Joyce and Trevor do have in common, at least thematically) - the next batch that I read last night includes Eveline, the young woman planning to leave home with a man she's met, leaving her selfish and abusive father and heading for Argentina - but she just can't bring herself to leave (most readers expect the more typical "surprise" - that he would be a cad and never show up at the pier); the Two Gallants, in which a very coarse young man brags about taking advantage of women, and his more self-effacing friend spies on him throughout an evening - leading to an ending that I don't quite understand even yet, in which he shows in triumph a gold coin - did he get her to give it to him? why?; and the famous After the Race, about a young man who gambles away a great deal of money, wasting money and time, wasting his life - you can see that each of these characters is trapped - the first three stories focus on schoolboys, and these three focus on people in their late teens or early 20s, ready to start a life, but it looks as if no life lies before them. The delicate beauty of so many scenes in these stories contrasts sharply with the darkness and suffocation of the lives of the characters.